pictures and words

Category Archives: information architecture

One of the peculiar & cool features of WordPress blogs is that they are strewn across the vast shore of blogs that is WordPress.com.

WordPress uses categories and/or tags to taxonomically link between posts that have similar content. The common tags like art or news or photography have become fairly polished online magazines. Less used tags like wine or Michigan are more like little eddies around which similar content flows.

In either case, it means that people you’ve never met drop by to read things, and you have a chance to do the same. Here’s something I found from Aaron Leaman titled Documented Elements that I liked.

I was emailing someone to tell them not to worry when a big site like Flickr or YouTube loses a bunch of media, that despite the fact that those sites are massive and complex systems, there’s a lot of smart people there who spend all their time figuring out how the systems work and how to improve and fix them.

Then it struck me that 200 years ago, those very same “best & brightest” were working to discover the undiscovered and better understand the immensity of Creation.

“With Google App Engine, developers can write Web applications based on the same building blocks that Google uses,” Kevin Gibbs, Google’s technical lead for the project, wrote in a company blog (link). “Google App Engine packages those building blocks and provides access to scalable infrastructure that we hope will make it easier for developers to scale their applications automatically as they grow.

Translation: Use our blocks, kids. They’re the bestest.

This photo is titled MT Cloudy and it’s part of GoDa;s picks. On the photo post he wrote:

From my balcony the other day,
A mountain of floating skyscrapers appeared,
Imagination took over…

I have no idea if ‘ll ever see the day when imagination takes over, but somedays I think I will…

“Why does flickr go down so much?” I wondered to The Google. None less than net luminary Tim O’Reilly answered my call with a database war story that revealed the tip of the brobdingnagian iceberg that lies under shiny-smooth, folksonomical web apps like flickr and YouTube that sort and sift stuff according what many people say about it.

While waiting early for the show to start, Jill and her road manager (?)pulled up in a van and came in through the front door. She let me take her picture (bless her heart, I think she had just woken up) and noticed the Holga. “Aren’t they fun?” she said. She didn’t think the flash on the flash models did much, though.

Shortly after taking this picture, the back popped off the Holga. Can you tell? I was so worried that the only two pictures I cared about on this roll were lost. As luck would have it, she and Billy were the only two that really came out.

Dunrie over at Scientific Ink pointed out the very cool Give One Get One program from One Laptop Per Child (OLPC). If you order by November 26, you can get a $100 XO laptop and also give one to a child in a developing nation. The XO laptop itself is an engineering marvel: a meticulously engineered device that’s designed to survive in extreme environments with minimal power that at the same time provides a computing environment that’s designed for children who know nothing about computing. Of special interest to me was the social sharing, which uses each laptop’s wireless connection to form what they call “mesh networks” and the software interface that has a range of simple apps that cover pretty much the range of what a kid needs to do on a computer and also leverages the social network. There’s even a button that reveals the code behind certain programs.

A teacher and student say…

Before the laptop, the focus of the school curriculum and evaluation was to show what students don’t know. Now, the focus is in what the student knows, and how this knowledge can be used as a support so they learn even more.

I use my computer very carefully so that it will not spoil. I use it to type, I use it to write, I use it to draw, I use it to play games… I’m using my computer at home to type assignment.

I don’t know anything about t3ngf0ung other than he or she had this cool photo of a classroom full of the $100 laptops.

“The challenge with Facebook Apps today – and don’t get me wrong, we think that they are fantastic – is that there isn’t a lot of space for them to exist. You really only have one little box on a profile page. As a result of this constraint, the apps on Facebook tend to be more playful.”

I think that “playful” is shorthand for “silly” … I also think that the idea that apps (and eventually data) can bounce from platform to platform is yet another speed limit to fall on the Information Superhighway (sorry to get all 1999 on you there). If you want to get your geek on, read Open Social: a new universe of social applications all over the web, where Netscape founder and Ning principal Marc Andresson explores the new Open Social API in depth.

It’s a pretty good read and not too technical. I think he makes some interesting points about programming, especially when he says something to the effect of Standards that standardize standard behavior succeed. It sounds kind of “well DUH” but it’s an important point that is too often overlooked. I was gratified in a silly sort of way to see that Marc calls his blogroll a linkroll. I’d chalk it up to “great minds” but I think that the similarity between our minds begins and ends right about there.

The photo is Reaching out… by carf. It doesn’t appear to have anything at all to do with social networking, but his photos do appear to have very much to do with some very important things – check them out!